EX-SEAL GOING TO PRISON FOR SMUGGLING WEAPONS

A former Coronado-based Navy SEAL who was convicted last fall of 13 weapons charges has been sentenced to 17½ years in federal prison and three years of supervised released, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Nicholas Bickle, 34, faced up to 20 years in prison after he was found guilty in October 2011 of smuggling machine guns home from Iraq and then giving them and other weapons to friends to sell on the street. U.S. District Court Judge Roger Hunt sentenced Bickle, who had originally faced 15 charges, in a Las Vegas federal courtroom.

Bickle has been in jail since December after receiving an other-than-honorable discharge from the Navy.

Prosecutors said during the trial that Bickle smuggled as many as 100 guns in a footlocker with a false bottom after deployments to Iraq with SEAL Team 5, the last of which ended in 2009.

Search warrants served on Bickle’s storage unit in San Diego revealed the footlocker. The storage unit also held 3,000 rounds of military ammunition, pieces of detonating equipment and two Ruger handguns originally intended for use by Iraqi police forces.

Three of Bickle’s co-conspirators pleaded guilty and agreed to testify that Bickle was the ringleader of the operation.

“The weapons in this case were not your ordinary firearms; rather, they were fully automatic machine guns that likely would have ended up in the hands of criminals,” U.S. Attorney Daniel G. Bogden said.

“The defendant’s conduct was serious, and the court imposed a lengthy prison sentence that should serve as a deterrent to anyone who is considering trafficking in machine guns or other firearms,” Bogden said.